Editor’s note: This article was first published in June 2012, during the economic crisis and high unemployment in Spain; its references to the current crisis and the scenes at the unemployment office refer to that period.
There’s an old saying: “Be careful who you step on on your way up, because you may run into them on your way down.” Unemployment has rained down on everyone alike. Rank-and-file workers and executives cross paths every day in the same office (the unemployment office), and some rather curious situations are arising: rank-and-file workers with an entrepreneurial spirit are coming to light, alongside executives who lack that spirit, because they were trained to manage a company, not to create one.
There are no statistics (at least none that I know of) on the percentage of bosses who are now working for their former employees, but I have already come across several cases. And certainly, if you admired your boss and considered them a true professional, who better than that person to be part of your business project?
That said, if I go back some 12 years and think about some of the bosses I have had, there has been a bit of everything. Some of them brought out my full potential, helped me reach my goals and helped me grow as a professional. Every day I learned something new. We even had our differences, but they never betrayed me.
I had other bosses I would only like to meet again as competitors, because they were so incompetent that they would be very weak rivals wherever they are now. They would never be able to put together a decent team, since a team’s competitiveness is usually a reflection of the leader who runs it.
There are many mistakes a leader makes over the course of a management career. Some mistakes are part of managing. You could say they are part of the learning process, because nobody is exempt from making them, however long their career. You usually come out of those mistakes with a lesson learned.
On the other hand, there is another kind of failing that is less a mistake than a condition the person comes with “as standard”: refusing to take any share of the blame for poor results while claiming the wins for themselves in front of senior management, not keeping their word, or being selfish.
Speaking rudely to an employee, disrespecting them and reprimanding them in public are very common mistakes that you see every day in companies.
Thinking that you’re the boss (the big boss) and that everyone else is just a work machine and a slave to production shows a lack of “human touch”. A management mistake can be corrected, but at a certain age it isn’t easy to change what a person has become, blinded by their position.
Of course, as the old-timers say: “Life takes many turns, and you never know where we’ll meet again.”
This crisis has left former bosses and former employees at the foot of the mountain, on the same level. Perhaps it’s time to form partnerships or strategic alliances between boss and employee. That’s what some people have thought.
The new entrepreneur doesn’t have much to lose, so they have a lot to gain. The former employee turned entrepreneur has the drive, the vitality and the energy to start a new project from the ground up. The former executive usually has contacts that the new entrepreneur would find hard to reach at first, and if they ran the company on their own merits, they could be an immense source of knowledge.
This is where trust is needed when it comes to approaching a former boss, and that trust has to have been earned in the past. Now is when the former executive realises their worth, because they were the one with the power to evaluate a team, but they seldom thought that during all that time they were being assessed too. Today many of these executives have their professional future in the hands of former employees who, after losing their jobs, decided to start their own business, or who simply hold a key position in a company where they select candidates.
The moral of all this: “Be human and, wherever you are and whatever position you hold, always treat everyone as people. Always be professional and fair. Earn the trust not only of your bosses but of your employees. You never know what the person below you today will become, or where you’ll meet them again.”
In the statistics of companies that measure workplace climate, in more than 50% of cases more than 80% of the staff think their immediate boss is “toxic” for the company. Only 5% of companies attach any importance to having an executive whose employees don’t value them.
Now think about your boss or former boss. If you needed an executive for a business project of your own… would you call them? Do you think they could still bring you experience, or do you think your two-year-old would do a better job than your boss?
Featured image: Eric Pancer, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
